This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).
THE SCIENTIST
Old friend, always leaving half of a sandwich for me, slipping her best cards beneath the table— a trick. Her hands, lithic. Cold,
precise as soft claw. Just her finger on my forehead and my lip, quivering.
What natural history, our affair— strata like necklaces laced, then undone. Each catalyst preserved perfect as the day it was doomed,
my hands too small to reach the thistle- nest of her closely guarded church.
The ability to predict catastrophe this far in advance is zero, Doctor— her affection sparks a flight of birds burning shadow
a feather’s width of whiskey and my fingers stroking the rough buzz of her scalp. Ancient, these flutters.
Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
In the 90’s, Robert Guzikowski had a bout of encephalitis that caused aphasia, which is the inability to form and/or comprehend written or spoken words, or sometimes both. This is the subject of unwordly (Uncollected Press, 2024). In fact, the vast majority of poems are titled “Aphasia Poem,” followed by a number. Most of them have a structure: four tercets, followed by a (usually) rhyming couplet. The imposition of structure intentionally underscore its arbitrariness, especially in the face of aphasia.
The first section of the book, “Shape o With Asemic Writing,” contains only one poem, “Aphasia Poem o,” which displays a writer who is sharply attuned to their own work. It begins “I can not speak this tale / ever changing yet it’s the only / story I have” (Guzikowski 2). He’s told the book’s personal history in three lines. But this poem also contains hints of what is to come in the following pages. Guzikowski describes himself as
a mythic
creature here suddenly
in the now and in the abcanny
flesh evading every meaning. (2)
His mastery of the English language (though I’m sure he would insist there is no such thing) is such that he can create words: I take “abcanny” to be a mixture of uncanny and abject. The two words the perfect description for the way you feel about your own body when it has betrayed you, become strange to you; the fusion of the two words hints at the larger theme in the book of the malleability of language, the strangeness of it that can only be grasped by someone who has been estranged from it.
Guzikowski renders his experiences with aphasia offers moments of poetic beauty and wisdom; he does not romanticize. They are, first and foremost, painful. “Aphasia Poem 25” conveys this better than any other, representing aphasia, the struggle to form language, not so much a struggle of the mind, but one of the body:
morphemes in
semantic disarray identity
disintegrating as
droning pulsating medications
harvest central nervous system pain
confusion and chaos
from scatting and riffing syllables
rising out of the polyrhythmic
intermodal senses. (Guzikowski 35)
The lack of punctuation here adds tremendously to the rapid, almost frantic effect of the poem as he tries to make meaning again. And, as is typical of the collection, Guzikowski makes the most effective use possible of the words he chooses. The way the medications drone and pulsate as identity disintegrates create a scene that is truly nightmarish and disorienting. Here, the words “scatting” and “riffing” are divorced from their typically joyful, exploratory connotations (though he does make explicit reference to jazz giant Thelonious Monk later on) and instead become an act of desperation, a panicked attempt to make meaning—which, as the poem poignantly points out, is almost inextricable from a sense of identity.
The best moments of the book were those where Guzikowski draws connections between language, the body, nature, and the cosmos. In “Disabled Poem 4,” Guzikowski suggests that when human beings die they become a beam of light—not so much a transformation as a return to an original, ethereal form. He muses, with psychedelic wisdom: “the mimetic self / the full de-realized fully / depersonalized fully still a self” (Guzikowski 34). The standout poem of the collection, though, is “Aphasia Poem 13.” It is philosophical and paradoxical, concerned with creation and anti-theological, claiming
there was no beginning
first second day no fortnight kingfisher
resurrection…
no
utterance shattering gravity.
yet somehow all speech is
monotonic incantation that
simultaneously creates and
reveals space gives name and
finite form to subjectivity. (Guzikowski 21)
He seems at the beginning to refute John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” But then he reckons with the fact that language does the work of creation, in that it does not just generate, but “reveals space”, i.e., gives things boundaries, limits, and thus, form. Maybe it doesn’t do this in a literal sense, at least in terms of the world, but when it comes to the self, language is the only way to make the self known, even to, well, yourself. I don’t remember when I last read anything with such profound metaphysical implications.
Reading the book was satisfying in a way that I find to be paradoxically invigorating, much like good exercise. But unwordly isn’t all chaotic, anti-grammatical grappling with the Big Questions. Moments of simple and often transcendent beauty are placed throughout. “Aphasia Poem 35” offers the former kind: “shifting shape to fairy-size / buddha finds repose / among mosses and twigs” (Guzikowski 18). It’s the simple conveyance of a scene, coming as a moment of rest. In a book bursting with existential insights and interplanetary ponderings, it’s almost healing to have the poet simply enjoy the beauty of what’s before him. And in a way, the ability to do that, to be truly present, is transcendent. “Aphasia Poem 24 (Disabled Poem 1)” a consummate example of Guzikowski’s ability to bed words and grammar to his poetic will, is a critique of people like me, who “aren’t / able enough to theorize silence(ness) / not (only) as metaphor or structure but / as identity” (31). Through silence, Guzikowski posits, we can “find common / home aloneness one humanity” (31).
Indeed, humanity itself, it seems, is just one of the subjects of this book. Others include, as has been alluded to, the infinite, jazz music, animisim. Towards the end of unwordly there are dazzling love poems in which Guzikowski looks at his wife and thinks “light / illuminates and revealed every / face of your face” (58). There is so much in here I didn’t get to tell you about; unwordly is one of those rare gems of a book whose virtues cannot be communicated; it has to be experienced.
Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge magazine, Emerson Green Mag, and won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).
THE [ ] WIFE
the wife is a disguise/a crane/a fox/a fish/a seal whose skin is left on a rocky inlet/ who plucks out each of her opulent feathers/ who sweeps the floor with her tail/ who cooks her own limb for the soup
& the sack of rice/the cupboard/her womb fills and refills & the man owns her & she owes him sustenance/sex/money/ immortality/offspring/death
& she disappears into the waves/wind/hills leaving the man a box of gold/her eyes/a child/ her fat magical heart
Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).
The Night We Met
we made out on the teal loveseat in my garage,
passed smoke between us like teenagers, pressed between the sloppy rows
of boxes left by my ex- love. You didn’t mind, knew bodies wound
together for a time, then parted, like the best of dances, the worst of sutures.
You elbowed the wine glass into shatter and fluster— for the spirits, I laughed,
and forgot the ghost hanging in the high air of that house. The beautiful dark
of even your eyebrows eclipsed the tumbling night. I couldn’t have known
who you would become: mapmaker whose mouth leads me to the study
of flowers. When you speak I hold your language, its roil and hollow,
in my own mouth like a bulb. My hands burn and bloom in the kitchen, garden, bed—
your body a breathless path I learn by touch.
Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil (Cornerstone Press, 2024).
Days of 1985
Lament with Swimsuit & Ouija Board
Side A
We who pretended to lie down at parties with lovers on vinyl couches or wished
we didn’t but wouldn’t admit it, licked salt from necks (bass leaping with our breath
(or was it expanding/escaping inside us? (the black light’s purple stripes
transforming eyes/teeth into green glowing beings, separate, alive, our faces
into negatives))) cried at dawn. If we did it (we did it) because the Coke bottle
chose us when it spun. A boy jammed his tongue into my mouth, which was my first kiss. We didn’t
ask questions. Or we fielded Ouija board guesses, Yes/No/Good-bye. I walked into that closet willingly let them lock it. O our wasted
adolescence, assessing vertical stripes on swimsuits as a function of decreased
belly fat, obsessed with how thighs pooled when we sat, how absent thigh gap leads to ruin.
We dieted on Cheez Balls (one every 55 minutes, dissolved on the tongue to a well
of melted butter). Or we teased our hair to make our faces slimmer. Ruin, from
the Latin ruere—“to fall”—as in headlong or with a crash. We were always falling/
laughing/collapsing/unable to stand our bodies pulsing with famine.
Aubade as New Pastoral
Lament with Swimsuit and Game Board
Side B For the Lost Beloved
We chopped beets for the borscht & all afternoon sweet steam filled the black & white kitchen. Wine glasses full, filling, up from the couch down again, rotating spots in socked feet, radiators hissing. Th e walk home I can’t remember if I drove or with sneaker prints in snow drifts walked alone,
but the torn-down marquee
flicked out, just like the time a man followed us (we crossed the road & looked back but he’d turned into a dime, flattened behind a lamp post). We played Parcheesi till dawn, yearning for summer, for swimming Lake Michigan (which yes, you kept me to it) the two of us dressed for a picnic.
We leapt in
where waves broke over limestone blocks where tidal flow crashed us toward rocks, our bodies alive with risk with demand, we must press on, swim, no lady aboard a rowboat counting strokes no arms to lift us dripping, out. There was nothing erotic about it
except the body’s own pleasure
& destruction. This is what always happens. I’ll stand in a museum & my hand is a talon sketched by Michelangelo—yes, it’s the way I clutch my pen, the years crossing & it doesn’t make a difference. You are the same one I held hands with at the double feature
second-run—you must
understand—& when we kiss we’re kissing all the lovers we’ve ever had, all the future lovers. You must remember how water swallowed our skin, how each stroke flung droplets hungry for the sun. Like a scroll of instructions delivered by manservants bearing pomegranates
(they’re detailed in the letter, the one with the talon sketch), palm-leaf fans in marbled halls depict flies/sweat, steadfast in what we no longer want.
Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:
The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is a visual artist, poet, and educator from the Bronx. Her latest poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) is a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize. She is currently at work on a project of “erasing war” and creating original erasures, collages, and visual art from war ephemera in the Western canon. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, Ellen is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
With the release of her second novel, Jen Knox breaks new ground with Chaos Magic (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2025), offering a refreshingly modern take on spirituality and magical realism. By striking a balance between serious topics and vibrant fantasy, this novel explores themes like domestic violence, female friendship, and learning to trust your intuition.
The novel begins by introducing us to Lissa, a woman who has struggled at the hands of her abusive husband and seeks refuge at The Lavender Center, a holistic haven for victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking. “Lissa had always been a dreamy girl, like her father, so it wasn’t a surprise she wanted to come to a place like this that promised a bit of magic to heal…” (Knox 17), says Lissa’s mother, Pauline, a retired psychologist and eternal skeptic. While Pauline is immediately wary of the center and the mystical, white-haired women who run it, the center offers healing techniques from yoga to deep meditation. And unbeknownst to others, the owners, Doreen and Glenda, are also practicing witches. It is here that Lissa meets her new roommate, Annika, a victim of domestic violence and also a self-proclaimed witch, one who is looking to start her own coven. Told through omniscient narration, the story unfolds through chapters with alternating perspectives, and we fluctuate between dreamlike introspection and typical narrative. We gain insight into Lissa’s anxious mind, Pauline’s cynicism, the warped thinking of Trent, Lissa’s ex-husband, and the lengths Annika will go to protect her friend.
After months of practicing and learning from Annika and other witches, Lissa discovers how to harness the spiritual powers that have always been inside her, enabling her to serve as a medium and communicate with the dead. Knox paints vivid scenes of late nights honing their skills around a roaring campfire and sharing cups of cinnamon-infused mead. Knox describes when one of those nights in the woods when she says, “The soft rain had ceased, and now only a gentle wind nudged the fire. Each element was with them, inside them” (Knox 29).
After leaving The Lavender Center, Lissa and Annika decide to open a metaphysical shop called The Spirit House, where they sell crystals, perform tarot card readings, and practice spiritual healing for the community. But soon after opening, Lissa learns news that leads her to pursue the dangerous magic that Annika has warned her against. Knox writes,
“True magic, to Annika, wasn’t ever about revenge. An autodidact at heart, she’d studied enough to know that the most powerful magic came from a place of personal connection, not external destruction. To manipulate another person’s energy was to feed it, in one way or another.” (Knox 24)
Following Lissa’s fatal mistake, it is the power of her strong female friendships that must find a way to keep her afloat through her darkest times.
Through its layered narrative, Chaos Magic brings a new perspective to this genre. While we tend to turn to books to escape the woes of our everyday world, stories centered heavily on witchcraft and spellbinding can sometimes feel so deeply detached from reality that they become difficult to relate to. Knox, however, accomplishes this difficult feat. She finds a way to seamlessly blend practical occult practices with grounded storytelling, so readers can find Lissa’s journey relatable and honest, yet enchanting.
And it is not only the plot and characters that draw the reader in. The physical descriptions throughout the novel place us so distinctly in the scene that we have no choice but to be enveloped by the chaos. Knox describes The Spirit House: “Lissa paused by the display cases filled with handmade jewelry, athames, spell kits, and a variety of collectible esoteric books, noticing that the trash cans hadn’t been emptied, and a kombucha bottle had been left near the register.” (Knox 46). This illustration of the shop makes you want to bask in the glow of a lavender candle as you wander the store with a warm cup of tea.
We also gain insight into the visceral fear that overcomes Lissa after hearing the lifechanging news, as Knox writes, “[Lissa] remembered the feeling of his rough hands releasing her throat when Annika and Glenda burst into the room that day. She remembered closing her eyes as her breath and energy thinned, melting underneath his grip, as she recited a mantra no one taught her. One she’d thought had come true. I wish I could start over” (Knox 90). It is the presence and description of these moments that determine the power of this book. It is also this combination of coziness and intense paranormal fiction that makes this novel reminiscent of Practical Magic, a conclusion drawn by many readers.
Chaos Magic is not just for those looking for a story with the perfect mix of magical and rational. But it’s also for readers who resonate with stories of emotional honesty, learning how to lean on female companionship, and discovering how to come back stronger after trauma.
Elizabeth “Lizzy” DiGrande is a graduate student in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing program, where she also serves as a Transformational Leaders Fellow and Writing Assistant for the Emerson Grad Life Blog. She is on the board of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston chapter, and is passionate about amplifying women’s voices in publishing. Originally from New Jersey, she now resides in Boston and can often be found perusing the city’s public libraries or exploring new restaurants. She hopes to build a career as both a food writer and literary agent championing female-identifying authors.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil (Cornerstone Press, 2024).
Love Song with Contradictions
Side A
What were you listening to, Great-gramma down at the lake, that Saturday nite when you felt you couldn’t breathe? Not those lo- riders waxed and raring, but the way souped-up carburetors suck oxygen to drag along the strip, your gulping breaths, gurgling, ineffective. The ambulance fetched you. In the hospital, they lopped off your thick braids (to think you never grayed!) “for convenience” or “to ease sweating.” Gramma brought them home, kept them in a candle box next to her bed. Each night she’d slide back the lid and touch them. The surprise of it—oh! sorting the clutter, after the house sold, ma found them under the sink next to the Brillo pads. It was unexpected— not the way as a girl, when I first touched myself, thought I’ll die from this, more like a child wandering aisles of jarred foods who looks up and can’t spot her mother, howls a siren of rage. Love is not a boat moored on a lake that bobs on waves, more like a house, it’s foundation drilled into bedrock, that in an earthquake still shakes. Can you explain this inheritance? Gramma knotted to her bed so she won’t “sustain a fracture.” O to be found but never claimed!— picking bright pink cherries not for glitz but for sweetness. Pay attention, ma said. Keep up.
Side B with two italicized lines from Bernadette Mayer
On the avenues, white exhaust tinges blue; a pigeon nearly gets me, perched over the red church door.
For lunch I pack a ham & turkey sandwich; I want to hose the city down with bleach.
Mostly images don’t form patterns; or they do—it’s my mind
arranging them, giving an impression of continuity, not unlike the man with a serpentine walk
I’ve avoided all my life looking down at my shoes. When I say “the man” I don’t mean my father.
Of course, I’m told we walk alike; from behind we have the same stooped cadence,
arches collapsed, soles worn on a slant. Is that him I just passed?
I don’t like cooking dinner; I get bored listening to my husband’s yakety yak.
“I have to send my meeting notes in the morning,” he says; I stir-fry the tofu/get distracted
by the inner turmoil of paying rent & what it means to be a good person.
In another place or through window tint it appears to be raining on asphalt.
Storm pipes branch beneath swarming feet; we weave around each other like flamingos
on takeoff or just before dancing, each of us moving in unison, a dot on the GPS.
Little Dot, move left; Little Dot, don’t move, just blink in vertical space
going up the office escalator, toting coffee in a paper cup; Little Dot plugged with earbuds.
Riding backwards on trains we’re time-lapsed; or we flicker like flamingos
mating in the infrared; each orange splotch with a yellow heart pulsing
at once above/below; It’s easier for love to have a million neighbors
seems a breezy thing to say, appropriate not slutty, our mouths’ sucking frenzy;
yet like zebra fish we zag in blue swaths, flashing eyes, lacing fins, in fact
yes, I’m avoiding the text just in from my landlord asking WHERE IS THE RENT
Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:
The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is a visual artist, poet, and educator from the Bronx. Her latest poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) is a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize. She is currently at work on a project of “erasing war” and creating original erasures, collages, and visual art from war ephemera in the Western canon. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, Ellen is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil (Cornerstone Press, 2024).
Birthday
Pastoral
Side A
We ate burgers bloody, buns toasted in grease & where teeth split the meat, red dribbled down our chins onto the grass. August & the ghost moon shone w/out the sun having set. Bees pummeled my head so I’d get up & run, sit down again, slather butter on corn, get up, circle & duck, hand slap thigh slap foot. The buried cat sprouted a raspberry bush. Nothing with thorns ma said, but that bush was an exception. My sister sat calm when a bee brushed her cheek. Like a statue she said, but the world is a breathing place. Tulips dropped petals, & the inner eyes of stalks stained fingertips. That night we whispered, my sister & I, through grillwork, labyrinth of heating ducts that connected us. Ma’s love cries echoed through the house. I baked a cake, ransacked the cupboard to cover it in sugared hearts. How sweet it was, feasting like that in the dark.
Pastoral
Side B
Such greenness—the lawn!
Bent-back blades & dewdrop sequins stitched in sequence replicate
the fly’s eye tweed of my dress.
Here I am, mama, amplified the way you always wished.
Lawnmower ripcord starts up, the kind that tugs gasoline-rich
the kind that swipes off toes, like when cousin Linus
sprinkled the grass with his flesh.
Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:
The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is a visual artist, poet, and educator from the Bronx. Her latest poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) is a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize. She is currently at work on a project of “erasing war” and creating original erasures, collages, and visual art from war ephemera in the Western canon. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, Ellen is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil (Cornerstone Press, 2024).
No Money for Boots
Love as Uprooted Flora
Side A
Ma wanted birthday lilies so you stomped through snow to the florist’s beige counter, tiled floor. Tiger lilies. No dull
white for her, no pink tongue center yanked fresh from a mountain path. It was six years since Daddy plucked the spark plugs and left.
Lilies you nearly crushed getting back, bare legs bright red
like knuckles, simultaneously snow-wet and bled. And stars in snowdrifts glittered. Not stars but tiny crystals moved as you moved down the block, a wave of stars
followed you home and the stems gone bent and you not broken
Love as Invasive Species
Side B
The day the tarantula escaped, my uncle joked, “The cage is empty.” He said it over cornflakes— the rock fallen off, the mesh lid mysteriously askew.
He smiled and slurped and chewed. We searched behind the couch cushions, among piano hammers’ knotted strings, in the broom closet
with its scary duster. (How many days had he let it out for a walk—crossing the afghan’s colored squares draped across the backrest?) At night I dreamt it crept
across the headboard as I slept, scuttled clacks, each foot a seed-hard talon, spilled tacks. Gramma finally found it when shaking the sheets out:
black and lacy it sailed through the air, then scampered under the bookshelf where it hid then disappeared beneath baseboards.
The walls breathe with it now, acrid, not unlike the air outside the zoo’s tropical house, toucans dripping guano black as the berries they ate.
I coax it with felled moths, pheromones exuding from their bungled heads after all night blinging the bulb’s sexless filament.
Or I stun lightning bugs with a mosquito-zapping racquet, sweep twitching bodies near the crevice, where I expect long fingers to sense their way out, scoop the offering
into its mouth. Or I want it gone, to know it’s no longer fingering up the walls, its carcass a dropped glove I’ll bury in the yard
beside a house quietly erupting, cupboards sagging with china plates, identity papers locked inside a fireproof safe,
the last will and testament edited, crossed out, signed in a wavering, unrecognizable hand (the tarantula’s carapace slipping off,
mushrooms growing where its abdomen once was), the bookshelves collapsing, centipedes and their nymphs
thriving amid musty spines, the loved and unread occupying the same space inside their dead wood frames.
The cage is empty—I bring home a mate and watch it sleep under the heat lamp, tap at the glass, hoping
I’ll find a way to live again grateful, tame among the rocks.
Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:
The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is a visual artist, poet, and educator from the Bronx. Her latest poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) is a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize. She is currently at work on a project of “erasing war” and creating original erasures, collages, and visual art from war ephemera in the Western canon. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, Ellen is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil (Cornerstone Press, 2024).
Prayer
Side A
Daughter, if I forget to teach you to hunger, to sup as I did, ice chips in the lawless 4 a.m. labor, awake w/ foot-kick & elbow-scrape, the body’s rhythmic snoozing, then follow this dull ache that insists the body open. Here, at the length-of-a-vein, from navel’s hollow to how-low-the-azalea-bloom, your propulsion into the expectant room.
O, to hold or be held, to unspool like loose thread! – the hospital gown spilling behind you—how far it must stretch! Unraveling when you climb the steps, press your fingers to check the spider plant’s thirst, until the garment gives out & who knows when— O, to block-print in felt-tip on the bracelet circling your wrist, Hello, my name is ________.
Side B
Daughter, you filled a shoebox with dead wasps, leaf blankets,
cut needles shot from pine, painted the cardboard
black to keep the light inside. It was a good day,
an ice cube tray full and cracked and split,
the water shaped to hold in our mouths. There was no
treasure. Cool liquid slid down our throats
in the garden. I quizzed you for your biology final—
all alveoli and exchange of oxygen. Tomato plants
hummed, fledglings squawked for their mama’s return,
and the sun blazed dewdrops to extinction.
World spinning through dark and dark itself spiraling (yes, spiraling!) through the void
future world with both of us gone that from a distance shone like a star
Science, do not forsake us. Pretend dying won’t be inglorious
and hard, that we’ll reflect light like gowns sequined and glittering, various
and continual, shouting out over time our urgent unimpeded burning.
Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:
The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is a visual artist, poet, and educator from the Bronx. Her latest poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) is a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize. She is currently at work on a project of “erasing war” and creating original erasures, collages, and visual art from war ephemera in the Western canon. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, Ellen is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
